Category: Blog

Psychoanalysis involves the telling of a history. This is a personal history but never just the history of a person. It implicates one’s family history and its generational transmission. We can think of a psychoanalysis as an effort to give this history a place, or give oneself a place within it. The telling of this […]

What is psychoanalysis and what makes it different? Psychoanalysis is a response to human suffering. It is a form of psychotherapy, but it’s very different from other kinds of psychotherapy. In this video we look at how it’s different, how it works, and a little about what the experience of a psychoanalysis is like. Contact […]

This video is about the space of the mind and how we think of it. From a picture that doesn’t make sense, to the topological models that re-describe psychical space and which interested Lacan for 25 years. We look at how these ideas are used in clinical work in Lacanian psychoanalytic psychotherapy, illustrated with examples […]

Exploring the concept of the uncanny in psychoanalysis, beginning with Freud’s 1919 paper and how Lacan later returned to it in elaborating his ideas on anxiety and the object a. Based on a panel talk I gave at the Museum of the Home in London, September 2022 on ‘The Unhomely: Explorations of Disaspora and Cultural […]

Part II of a short series of videos introducing the concept of repression in psychoanalysis, looking at one of Freud’s most famous cases, and Jacques Lacan’s take on it. By Owen Hewitson, LacanOnline.com All content on LacanOnline.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

In Part I we looked at the history of trauma theory and framed its various debates against the backdrop of two key problems that any theory of trauma has to confront: the ‘event’ and its ‘affective weight’. Problem 1: The Event – if a certain event or experience is often sought at the aetiology of […]

Trauma often appears to be a very broadly-spread notion in psychotherapy. Its urgency in clinical settings seems to outpace the theoretical rigour we can give it, leading the label ‘trauma’ to have been been ascribed to all kinds of experience, from birth, to sex, war, and even to love. Moreover, it sometimes seems that the […]

We’re going to start with a naive question – what is the ‘stuff’ of the unconscious? This short article is about the unconscious of ‘things’, and if we think about what these ‘things’ might be, psychoanalysis already gives us several possible answers. We could think of: Freud’s ‘thing-presentations’ (Sachvorstellungen) Das Ding – the second sense […]

It is often said that psychoanalysts should look at structure, not surface symptoms, in order to make a clinical diagnosis. There are two problems with this. First, the definition of a particular structure has to be rigorous enough to recognise it when you see it. The question is: what characterises this structure, and is particular […]